Why do women advance more in Colombia? - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Women managers make up 38% of top management positions in Colombia
• Some research suggests that women executives in Colombia develop strong and inclusive leadership skills
• Research also suggests that Colombian culture might be more supportive of women as leaders than other countries in Latin America

“Initially I believed that education could be the reason for this position. Firstly, education in Colombia is clearly seen by students and their families as a very important factor in moving ahead and ‘making it in life’.”

Education
Initially I believed that education could be the reason for this position. Firstly, education in Colombia is clearly seen by students and their families as a very important factor in moving ahead and “making it in life”. Secondly, since all of the women I interviewed (over a hundred) had a professional degree and most of them had taken graduate studies, I believed initially that education was the “determining factor”.

However, when you look at educational data for Latin America, you find that women have high educational standards too in several other countries in the region, such as Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela.

Domestic help
Another factor that could account for the success of Colombia’s women executives could be the fact that the country still has a large and cheap domestic labour force. All of our interviewees mentioned this as a defining factor. They said that without this support they would not have been able to cope with the long working days and the need to travel. The domestic support helped them sustain their high commitment to their job and career development. However, most Latin-American countries have pretty much the same type of domestic support.

Violent culture
While recently interviewing a new group of executives, we asked what could be a possible explanation for our distinguished position and several of them mentioned the violence in Colombia as a unique factor that forces women to work. This may be true for many women at the base of the pyramid and for a few women at the top, but most women are not affected directly by this violence in this way.

Late marriage
Another explanation mentioned by a law office partner who we interviewed was the fact that Colombian women tend to marry later than in other countries precisely because they want to climb the organizational ladder before having a family.

“Women executives in Colombia [seem to] display a feminine touch when exerting their leadership which we have called “participative leadership”: open and direct, oriented towards group development, emphasizing consensus, willing to share power with colleagues and collaborators and making a strong effort to balance work and personal demands.”

Outstanding workers
My hypothesis about all this now suggests several explanations. Colombians – both men and women – are outstanding workers. They are extremely committed to hard work, they believe in the power of personal effort as the road to success, and they are reliable. Yes, they are very reliable. We are well known for our coffee, our emeralds and unfortunately for narcotraffic. This stereotype might foster the idea that we are unreliable. Yet this is not the case.

Strong women leaders with a feminine touch
According to our interviews, women executives in Colombia seem to have a very strong personal drive to do things well and to excel without having to take all of the credit for themselves. They display a feminine touch when exerting their leadership which we have called “participative leadership”: open and direct, oriented towards group development, emphasizing consensus, willing to share power with colleagues and collaborators and making a strong effort to balance work and personal demands.

However, these leadership traits are not exclusive to Colombia as shown by the comparative research I have made with colleagues (Maxfield, Cárdenas & Heller, 2008). This type of leadership can be found in several other Latin-American countries.

More accepting culture
Finally, a strong differential factor is that Colombian culture accepts women’s leadership more than in other Latin American countries. The famous “Latin machismo” is not so dominant in Colombia.

If a woman is a good leader who does her job well, she will be respected and followed. An illustration of this is that Colombia has several women bank presidents and many women in management in the financial sector, which are typically very masculine preserves in other countries. We also have several women engineers in the energy sector in top management positions, just to name a few areas.

In sum, Colombian has a high percentage of women leaders due to its particular culture, which derives from its own unique combination of different masculine and feminine factors.

Maxfield S. (2007) Women on the Verge II. Corporate Power in Latin America.

Maxfield, S. Cárdenas, C. & Heller, L. (2008) Mujeres y vida corporative en Latinoamérica. Retos y Dilemas. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes.